Isabel Healthcare Blog

On the Isabel healthcare blog, one of our main aims is to educate, inform and raise awareness about personal health, enabling people to understand their own symptoms or recognize them in loved ones, and open up fruitful discussions with their medical providers. This can include symptoms, causes and diagnosis information on a huge variety of conditions and diseases. These discussions can be on common afflictions such as fevers, or intimidating cancers, rare diseases such as kawasaki disease, and mental health. Mental health particularly has become much more at the forefront of all medicine, as we deal with the ever-growing pressures of modern life and the stresses on our mind that this can take.

Frequent urination (urinary frequency) is the need to pass urine many times during the day, or during the night where the term nocturia is used.  Most people urinate 6 or 7 times in 24 hours.  Both urinary frequency and nocturia result in more frequent urination, and this can either be more frequent but with less volume of urine, or more frequent with the same volume of urine as usual. Urinary frequency is therefore defined as needing to urinate more than 8 times in a period of 24 hours whilst drinking about 2 litres of fluid.  Urinary frequency may be accompanied by the constant or frequent sensation of feeling the need to pass urine urgently. This symptom results from lower genitourinary tract disorders and bladder inflammation, which can cause the sensation of needing to urinate. This sensation doesn’t disappear when the bladder is emptied and patients experiencing urinary frequency continue trying to void but only pass small amounts of urine.  Frequent urination can affect your sleep, work and generally how you feel.

UK footballer Jonathan Walters hit the headlines recently when he bravely took to social media to tweet, not about his footwork skills on the pitch, but about his experience with a recent bowel screening test. In a bid to encourage more people to get checked, Walters spoke about the heartache of losing his mother at a young age to the disease, using Twitter to get his message out in a series of humorous tweets about the procedures used for bowel screening.

January 21st-27th was cervical cancer prevention week in the UK, where charities everywhere try to educate and raise awareness of cervical cancer, HPV vaccines and smear tests. We’ve written about cervical cancer and screenings for the disease before, so we won’t go into too many details about the symptoms and causes, but we did want to highlight the brilliant campaign that Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust have been running this year, called #SmearforSmear

Encephalitis is a rare, acute brain disease which affects around 1 in every 200,000 people each year. Anyone can contract encephalitis, but it is most common in children, the elderly and those with a lowered immune system. There are many different types of encephalitis, and it is difficult to treat, meaning prognosis varies. Some people make a full recovery, others experience small changes to their brain, memory, mood or physical capabilities. For a small amount of people, encephalitis has a severe impact on their day to day life.

This disease, which shares many clinical features with similar spinal cord and brain conditions such as polio and Guillan-Barré syndrome, has had a rise in incidence in the US particularly. Sharing symptoms with similar conditions, as well as having only been categorized as Acute Flaccid Myelitis since 2014, this relatively new disease is easily missed in a differential diagnosis, or misdiagnosed. Furthermore, it is an acute condition that mainly affects children, so educating on the information known is paramount.

January is National Glaucoma Awareness Month in the US, an important time to spread the word about the world’s 2nd leading cause of blindness according to the World Health Organisation. Over 3 million Americans and more than 64 million people worldwide suffer from this sight-stealing disease, and worryingly the figures are moving the wrong way. The National Eye Institute predicts a massive 58% increase in the condition by 2030, due in part to the ageing population. Known as ‘the sneak thief of sight,’ in most cases there are no obvious symptoms and once vision is lost, it’s permanent. As much as 40% of a person’s vision can be lost without the person noticing any prior symptoms. The disease also seems to be between 6 and 8 times more common in African and Latino populations. The condition can affect all ages, but most commonly is found in people of 45 years and over. While there is no cure for the disease, early detection is vital to stopping its progress.

It’s the start of 2019 and many exciting things are on the horizon for Isabel and the industry of AI in medicine as a whole. As we go into January we thought we would take a look back on the year that has passed, as we have done before, and reflect on the huge steps health AI has taken this year. We'll also look ahead to 2019 and beyond, predicting what we think will be the hot topics of the year ahead. Indeed, market research company Frost and Sullivan have predicted that health AI will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 66% over the next 4 years, so the future of health AI is certainly looking interesting.

Winter has arrived and with a combination of the colder weather which bugs thrive in, and the buildup for the holiday festivities,  there is an increase in winter illnesses at  this time. This leads to increased demand in Doctors’ offices, ERs and hospitals filling up with patients who are unwell.  Here are some of the more common winter illnesses which can present at this time of year.

It’s no secret that the holidays can often be associated more with exhaustion than enjoyment. Presents to buy and wrap, relatives to visit, food to cook….the list is never-ending, so no wonder many of us feel overly tired and lethargic well before the first present has been opened. We can easily blame flu-like symptoms, sore throats or even memory problems on the pre-Christmas build-up. But sometimes these symptoms have another more serious cause and are still lingering long after the decorations have been stored away.